Dark Shadows, Tim Burton’s supernatural vampire fantasy, is too much of a
horror for its own good.

Dark Shadows is far from the worst of Tim Burton’s films, but it may be the one that finally breaks his fans’ patience. Just as his Sleepy Hollow paid tribute to Hammer bodice-rippers and Mars Attacks! hymned cheesy, B-grade science fiction, Burton has once again made a camp, coolly disengaged homage to something he very much admires. But while Dark Shadows is nominally based on a cult 1960s supernatural TV drama not widely appreciated outside of the United States, the object of its affection is far closer to home. It’s Burton’s homage to himself.

All of the director’s tics, good and bad, are present in magnified form: his repertory company casting; his pasty-faced protagonists; his delight in overturning suburban norms and watching the kinkiness scuttle out from underneath. But this time, there is nothing behind the gothic window dressing to make the exercise interesting; it’s all flavouring, no crisp. Dark Shadows lacks a coherent story, engaging characters, ideas, charm, wit and purpose. The one thing it’s stuffed with is Burton gratia Burtonis: Burton for Burton’s sake.

It makes sense, then, that Dark Shadows is at its best in the opening scenes, when the film can afford to be all show and no tell. It’s Johnny Depp, naturally, who plays Barnabas Collins, an 18th-century Byronic rascal who is transformed into a vampire by a jealous witch and wakes up in Nixon-era small-town America. The witch, Angelique Bouchard, is played by Eva Green, whose contours are a perfect fit for the indulgent costumes and sets. She also has the distinct advantage over the other cast members of looking awake.

In a bone-rattling prologue, Angelique and the pitchfork-wielding population of Collinsport bury Barnabas alive in the forest, before we flash forward to 1972, where a train is snaking over the tidal salt flats towards the town, to the strains of Nights in White Satin. On board is Victoria Winters (Bella Heathcote), who hopes to work as a nanny for Barnabas’s descendants: the fading belle Elizabeth (Michelle Pfeiffer), her sullen teenage daughter Carolyn (Chloë Grace Moretz), Elizabeth’s philandering brother Roger (Jonny Lee Miller) and his glazed 10-year-old son David (Gulliver McGrath).

Her arrival suggests that Dark Shadows’ screenwriter, Seth Grahame-Smith, might have had the nous to filter the film’s whacked-out aesthetic through an outsider’s eyes. As soon as Barnabas’s coffin is unearthed by some unsuspecting workmen, however, Depp returns to centre stage and Heathcote might as well be covered by a dust sheet until the finale, along with Miller, McGrath and also Helena Bonham Carter, who takes on perhaps her least consequential role yet as the Collinses’ live-in psychiatrist.

With the family’s fish-canning business in decline and Angelique’s seafood firm the town’s largest employer, Barnabas vows to thwart his rival once and for all and restore the Collins clan to its former glory. In practice, this doesn’t amount to much more than Depp acting like a kind of gothic Austin Powers in various meaningless skits, as he struggles to adapt to a world of Cadillacs and ceramic pineapples. There are only so many times you can hear him compliment a woman on her “fine birthing hips” before the joke wears through at the elbows, and Burton’s tendency towards smut has never felt lazier.

This is Depp and Burton’s eighth film together, which brings them dead level with De Niro and Scorsese, although in numerical terms only. Dark Shadows looks as beguiling as a deserted mansion on a lonely hill, but it’s every bit as empty, and permeated by an unmistakably musty niff.